Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe discusses her approach to the faith and this podcast. She explores the value of rhetoric in understanding theological issues.
Producer’s Note: Due to some technical difficulties with our Virtual Church recording session, we are going to delay that episode until we can re-record some sections. This week, we are doing a solo episode with Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe.
Transcript
MET [00:38] Hello, all. Today it’s just me – Rev. Deborah is on sabbatical, and we had a few technical difficulties recording the virtual church episode, so Carl and I will get that out to you in the future, so I’m going to talk to you for just a bit on my own. So, it’s probably going to get a little heady, today. Buckle up for some schoolish-type-talk!
MET [01:00] No, really, I actually thought I would take a minute to talk to you about where I’m coming from. Sometimes it may seem like I am coming out of nowhere. I talk about all these wild rhetoricians or communication theories or whatever, and it may not seem abundantly clear why I make those connections sometimes. When we talked about Mary Magdalene I was going off about public memory and when we talked about South Africa I was giving you theories about whiteness and the law – I admit this is not normal. If you have a cup of coffee with a friend and say, “Hey, did you hear about…?” They are not going to respond to any of these things in the way I do.
MET [01:42] So, why? What is the point of all of this? How does it fit? And am I just a navel-gazer shoe-horning my particular ideas into a discussion about theological things?
It is quite possible that I AM all of those things. But if you’ll give me a chance to explain myself, I hope you’ll at least find my shoe-horning amusing.
MET [02:07] I teach a class in rhetorical theory. You may have heard me talk about it before. I really enjoy teaching it. It’s interesting, challenging, and for the most part the students are starting from ground zero. On the first day of class, when we’re going over the syllabus, I tell my students, I know you don’t want to be here. That often gets a laugh, or some shocked faces. But, I acknowledge, this is a class about both rhetoric and theory – two things that most people spend their entire college career trying desperately to avoid. And often I see some people get a bit more comfortable in their seats at that point. Because if we all start from the same place – and that place is that we all think this is going to suck – we’re at least in the same boat. But I go on from there. My aim, I tell them, is not to turn them into rhetoricians or theorists. I don’t expect any of them to go on and study rhetoric for the rest of their lives or think about theory forever and ever. My aim is to show them that these big, pie-in-the-sky questions that we think of as irrelevant or just for philosophers and people that don’t do anything with their lives actually matter. That some of these ideas are being played out in their everyday lives, right beneath their noses. That rhetoric, and all of the “nonsense stuff” that comes with it, is actually pretty essential to the way we function. People are pretty incredulous at that, but it gives us a starting point other than, you have to know this because KNOWLEDGE.
MET [03:52] I also tell them there is value in this kind of thing because of the KIND of learning I am asking them to do. The truth is, at least 70% of the jobs out there will be gone in 5-10 years. AI is coming for us all. And in their hearts they know this, because they have all been cheating and getting AI to do their work for them. What they haven’t put together yet is that if they are replacing themselves with AI now, then they are making themselves useless in 5 years. If they want to be useful, employable, and helpful in a few years, they have to show that they can do what the bots cannot. And if you spend your years in college getting the bots to do your work, you absolutely cannot do that. The thing the computers cannot do, is be human. They can do pretty much everything else. Really – everything. But they cannot understand the world the way a human does. They can’t make human connections and decisions. So, I tell my students, if you are thinking about how to make yourself as marketable as possible in the coming AI takeover, your goal shouldn’t be to learn to code, but to make yourself as explicitly human as possible. This is one of those classes where you learn to do that. In rhetorical theory we will wrestle with the questions that are at the heart of the human experience. And if that seems pointless to you, then the machines have already won.
And that may not immediately make you think of a project like this – but it really is an important connection.
MET [05:44] What I do is essentially a humanist project. Historically, rhetoric has been defined as just persuasion. But in the last century people have reconsidered that approach. Yes, there is a matter of convincing people – but that’s more than just a claim and evidence. There’s actually a lot of evidence out there that starting with a claim and presenting your proofs and then coming to a conclusion is a pretty terrible way to convince people because most people don’t believe proven evidence. Most people just don’t buy facts that don’t already justify what they believe, regardless of sources, logic, or presentation. So there are larger questions about emotion, narrative, and identification. These are the things we think about now. How do you reach people? How do you find people at their most human? And when we’re talking about spiritual matters, and how spiritual matters relate to public life, we are talking about inherently human matters.
Let me tell you about my rhetorical theory class again.
MET [06:58] I taught it at the grad level a few times, and it was always really well-received, but the approach threw people for a loop. Basically, I told my students on the first day we were going to read a whole bunch of really smart theorists and philosophers and at the end of the semester they were going to define three things: truth, reality, and rhetoric.
They generally laughed, and I said, no, I’m serious. You’re going to write your own rhetorical theory. Based on what we learn in class, you’re going to take on the mantle of western philosopher and define things that we’ve been struggling with for thousands of years. Good luck.
Man, you should see how they squirm.
But we make it through. And by the end of the semester they feel so smart and have so much to say. But they also know how much they don’t know, and that’s as good a thing to learn as any.
But let me break down the challenge here:
MET [08:04] Let’s say you want to define truth: is it capital T truth? Is it inherent and intrinsic? Is it immutable, and irrespective of the world around us? Does truth exist and not change regardless of the circumstances? Or is truth contextual? Are there different truths based on perspective or situation? Can a thing be true at one time, and not true at another? This question in and of itself is often baffling for my students, because they say they believe one thing, then find themselves defending the other. What I don’t tell them in the beginning is there is a theorist or philosopher who has covered pretty much any position they take – there’s nothing new under the sun – but watching them try to justify what seems to be a very inconsistent opinion is both amusing, but also encouraging as an instructor. They are learning.
Then we have to approach reality: For most of them, they just assume truth and reality are the same thing. If it is true it is real, and if it is not real, then it is not true. But, I ask them, doesn’t that depend on how you define truth? For example, if you are an American, you have been raised to believe in certain immutable truths – that all people are born equal and have the rights to life, liberty and happiness. We’re taught this from infancy on up. Equality. It’s the bedrock principle of America. So it is true that we are all equal. I have yet to have a student say they do not believe in equality. But, is that the reality? This generally causes great consternation. The question then becomes about not just what is real, but what is truth’s relationship to reality. It is true that women are equal to men. I absolutely, 100% believe that to be true. I also recognize the reality that we are not. What does one do with this discrepancy?
MET [10:28]Then consider rhetoric: If rhetoric is persuasion or identification, what does it have to do with these things? Consider the relationship to truth – if truth is immutable, then rhetoric is actually a really bad thing, because rhetoric could be used to persuade you from the truth. However, it is also pretty powerless in how it affects larger questions because it cannot affect the truth. The truth is sustained with or without rhetoric because it is intrinsic. However, if truth is situational, then rhetoric is EXTREMELY important, because that is HOW you create truth. If truth is made in the moment, you convince people of what is true at that time. You create truth as you go. Making a persuasive speaker one of the most powerful people in the world.
I think about all of these things when Rev. Deborah sit down to do a podcast because it weighs heavily on what I do when I am speaking to you. As a rhetorician, I am very interested in questions of truth, narrative, and persuasion. As a Christian, I am very aware that questions about truth, narrative, and persuasion are very dicey for a religion that claims, in many circles any way, to have a monopoly on truth.
MET [11:57] My job, in this podcast, is to provide a perspective on these topics that is not necessarily clerical, but considers the questions we pose from an intellectual, if Christian perspective. But, my intellectual perspective is shaped by my academic background. And my academic background demands that I constantly ask myself, where is the truth, here? What is real? Who is being persuaded of what? So the Bible is a fascinating document. It would be easy to say, “The Bible is true and that’s that.” And I’m comfortable with saying, “Sure, the Bible is true.” But is that different than saying the Bible is real? That’s a question I think we should all be asking ourselves. And, I am quite convinced, a thing is no less true just because it is not real. That can be a hard pill to swallow. But it’s something I wrestle with a lot as a person of reading and a person of faith.
MET [13:02] And I’m not here to argue that the Bible is a work of fiction with great truths in it. I absolutely believe that there is a great deal of the Bible we can look at and say, “Yeah, that happened!” The proof is in the pudding. But I am certainly not ready to think in any kind of literal terms. We don’t do ourselves any favors to say the world was literally created in seven days or that Joshua literally caused the sun to stop in the heavens.
MET [13:32] I also have to deal with questions of persuasion in the faith. I come from an Evangelical background where there was a huge emphasis on going out there and convincing people that they were going to go to hell if they didn’t accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. This is another one of those things that, honestly, most people aren’t just going to buy into. There are whole online groups devoted to making fun of Christians who do terrible things in the name of Jesus’ name to supposedly spread the good Word, and somehow the unsaved are supposed to think, “oh, yeah, I will definitely become a Christian, now.” At the same time, that reality question is such a humdinger. There are whole institutions built on convincing people that truth and reality are the same thing. If the Bible says it is true that Methuselah lived 900 years, then that is the reality.
MET [14:31] The reason I tell you these are particularly human questions, is ultimately, one of the last things you have to ask is “who?” Who benefits from you believing in a certain definition of truth or reality? Who benefits from you thinking that there is or is not a place for persuasion or identification in the stories that we tell? And that, dear friends, comes down to power. If someone has spent years telling you, that this is the way it is and there is no other way, they either benefit from that story, or have been so crushed by it themselves that they are reproducing it because they don’t know any other way. Someone wants you to know a particular narrative. It behooves you to ask who.
Finally, I want to tell you about some very specific ways that my field intersects with the faith, so just in case you think I’ve been feeding you a bunch of nonsense up until this point, I can prove that I’m coming from a place of actual connection.
MET [15:44] If you study rhetorical theory, you will very likely take a chronological type of approach. Start with the Sophists and work your way up to things like networked media. When you do that you can kind of follow a basic trajectory of how the West felt about things like these big questions about truth, reality, etc. One of the things that had a huge influence on our perspective on these things was institutional power. Whoever was in charge had a lot to say on what we believed. Now, if you’re an astute listener, you will automatically realize that the same people have been in charge for a really long time and have just recently started to, for a variety of reasons, share the institutional power; so that should give you some insight as to who was influencing our ideas about truth and reality and for what purpose. But for a few thousand years the people who were telling us what is real and what is believable were propertied, educated, white men. And if that is who is deciding what is true and real, you can probably see who benefited from that.
MET [17:00] There have been shifts here and there, though. And one of those happened in the Middle Ages. It wasn’t necessarily a particularly progressive shift, but it happened.
In the Middle Ages, we actually took a few steps backward. The Greeks and Romans had spent a long time building democracy, fashioning a rational way of looking at the world, and generally moving civilization in the direction of progress. Then Rome became an Empire, and empire is generally a bad thing and leads to regression and Rome fell to tyranny. When Rome began to fall apart, another power swooped in to take over – and that was the church.
The Church was no less an empire than Rome was. And the Church was much more invested in mandating truth and personal behavior. The Church took over the finances of the Western world, the state power, and began to regulate the lives of pretty much everyone living within its reaches. So all of those issues that the Classical philosophers and thinkers had been wrestling with – what’s true? Who counts? Who is a citizen? Who gets to be educated? – fell to the Church. And the church had an answer – Wealthy men. Because God said so. And it pretty much stayed that way for over 1000 years.
MET [18:30] The reason I bring this all up is because rhetoric, had kind of been through a number of manifestations through the Greek and Roman years. For the Greeks, rhetoric mattered immensely. That’s because in democracy, persuasion is ESSENTIAL. You don’t vote for a thing unless you are persuaded to do so. You make decisions based on who convinces you that they have the best idea. Rhetoric fell out of favor in Rome precisely because it was LESS democratic. As Rome fell to authoritarianism, it became less important for people to be able to express themselves in a cogent or effective manner because their voices didn’t matter. When people’s ideas don’t matter because only one person is in charge, rhetoric because an afterthought. When people have agency and can exact change in their world, then rhetoric is an essential. Once again, an astute observer might ask why in the last 50-100 years this subject has been taken out of the education system to the point that most people don’t even know what it is. But I digress.
This was the legacy the church inherited, and the Church made no efforts to change that. The Church was looking to maintain power and was not interested in fielding any questions. So it made sense that there weren’t too many major leaps in rhetorical theory for a while.
MET [20:08] But there was one person who stood out – St. Augustine. You will notice I said “Saint.” He was one of the integral fathers of the church and helped figure out early theological issues. He also wrote a book on rhetoric.
A word on St. Augustine – he may well have been bi-racial. That does not show up in any religion class or Sunday School lesson in general. Once again, we ask who is teaching us and why. In fact, I didn’t know this until I was watching a ridiculous television show about demons and detectives when one of the characters mentioned that Augustine’s mother Monica was probably Black. I was stunned. And so I did some fact-checking. Yeah – it’s definitely reasonable to think that. One of the most important Church fathers may not have been a white man. That was conveniently left out of my theology classes.
MET [21:12] Augustine wrote a piece called De Doctrina Christiana. In it, he sets out guidelines for interpreting scripture. What is notable is that he is not a literalist. Scriptural literalism didn’t pop up in Christian theology until much later. Augustine notes that there is figurative language, symbolic language, and even opportunities to think about grammar and structure when interpreting scripture. So he acknowledges in the very beginning that scripture teaches a variety of lessons, each of which may be equally true. He also talked about things that should be enjoyed and things that should be used. And his position is that God is enjoyable – we should take pleasure in our relationship with God. Other things are tools. This is in sharp contrast to the Puritans who would come later. But most importantly for our purposes, Augustine wrote about how eloquence should serve God, wisdom, and the proclamation of the gospel. An orator does not create truth – an orator serves truth and delivers it. God is the source of truth and wisdom and the orator is the vehicle by which that is delivered. Augustine gives some very good directions on how a speaker (in this circumstance, a priest) might do that, but ultimately, a speaker serves a cause, not himself.
MET [21:48] Consider that in terms of this podcast. Are we Augistinian? Do we simply share truths as they are handed to us by God? Do we interpret? Do we have more agency than that? Are we crafting a particular message for you that you should be wary of, the very same way I warn you to think about institutional powers? These are things I am quite sure you don’t think about. But I do. A lot. When I sit down to work on these podcasts I ask myself about my responsibilities to you, my discipline, and my faith. And because my discipline is such a terribly human one, it really does impact how I practice my faith. Because my faith is built of human things. Things like words and relationships. Without those things, I don’t know God. So looking at my faith through a lens that helps me understand words and relationships in general, helps me make sense of things that otherwise, I would have a lot of difficulty understanding.
MET [24:01] I know I have taken you on a heck of a journey today. You probably didn’t want to think this hard or hear about my classes this much. You’re probably missing Rev. Deborah’s optimism and her spiritual take on things. But I wanted to take this opportunity to explain where I am coming from, so the next time I drop some crazy term or theory on you, maybe you won’t think I am incredibly random or that I have lost my mind, but you’ll see how I am just trying to make sense of things, like you. And this just happens to be the best way I know how.
Okay. Thanks for listening to me through all of this. I’m happy to try to explain anything more if it didn’t make sense, so absolutely shoot me an email if you have questions. Carl, Rev. Deborah, and myself are just trying to make sense of the faith in this weird, new, mediated world. Let us know how we’re doing, or how we can help you.
MET [25:05] Thank you for listening to the Priest and the Prof. Find us at our website, https://priestandprof.org. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at podcast@priestandprof.org. Make sure to subscribe, and if you feel led, please leave a donation at priestandprof.org/donate/. That will help cover the costs of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church. Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.
DDM [25:36] Music by Audionautix.com
